Dread Nemesis of Mine (3 page)

"G'day guvnah!" shouted the cheerful lad who
cleaned up after the elephants, camels, and other assorted beasts,
which arrived in the cavern via the towering Obsidian Arch set in
the center of the space.

I waved back.

"Your hands are sweaty," Elyssa said as she
wreathed her fingers into mine.

"Gee, I wonder why."

She laughed. "Did you decide which phone you
want?"

"Yeah, I'm going with Orange." I watched the
dung boy shovel a heap of crap into a wagon. "Who is that kid?"

Elyssa shrugged. "No idea."

"Does he live here? Have family? I mean, who
do you have to piss off to get a job like this?"

"Why the curiosity all of a sudden?"

I gave her a questioning look. "All of a
sudden? I've only been here three times. It's not like I've had
much time to question the socio-economic situation of dung boys in
super-secret towns built by angels and used as portals to zip from
one side of the world to the other."

A deep throated laugh burst from her mouth.
"Where in the world do you come up with this stuff?"

"Quite possibly the very bowels of hell."

We entered the towering doors leading into
the Grotto itself. The town—if it could be called such a
thing—looked like something right out of the history books. A
cobblestone road known as Golden Way led past fancy shops
constructed of black marble with green-slate roofs and shiny copper
gutters. It had such an old world appeal, it could almost pass for
an amusement park or the movie set for a film based in the days of
sail-driven galleys and pirates.

Crowds of shoppers strolled casually through
the maze of streets, colorful shopping bags in hand. A
tired-looking sorceress led a group of excited children dressed in
the green robes of elementary grade Arcanes down the street toward
a store named Bixby's Arcane Supplies. A large, white wolf with
blazing blue eyes nipped at the heels of straggling kids to keep
them in line.

"Is that a werewolf?" I asked.

Elyssa followed my gaze. "If it was a normal
wolf, it would eat the kids."

"Can you imagine how much better discipline
would be at nom schools if we had werewolves?"

"Everyone would be too busy wetting their
pants to pay attention," Elyssa said, laughing. She tugged my hand
to keep me moving. "No time to sightsee today."

I groaned and continued on.

The sun shone brightly overhead and fluffy
clouds drifted on a light breeze despite our location some hundred
yards or so underground. The temperature felt pleasantly cool and
warmer than the gray chilly city aboveground.

I tried not to stare like a tourist but ended
up rubbernecking every few seconds as one bizarre sight after
another caught my eyes. This place was just
weird
—juxtaposed
between our reality and some other place. A sudden thought hit me
like a brick wall and I stopped in my tracks. A hurrying shopper
bumped into me and muttered an apology, though her pinched eyebrows
and glare said something else entirely.

"What is it?" Elyssa said, turning to look
through the window of the shop where we stood. A skimpy outfit made
from sheer fabric hung from a very lifelike looking mannequin in
the display and left very little to the imagination. "You want me
to try it on?"

I imagined Elyssa's athletic curves pressing
tight against the scant outfit and felt a blush creeping up my
neck. "Um, actually I was thinking of something else."

"
You
want to try it on?" She winked.
"I'm sure you'd look sexy."

I laughed uneasily. "Exactly." I took her arm
and led her down the sidewalk and away from the distraction.
"Actually, I remembered something you told me about this place when
I first arrived. About how this place exists in our world and
somewhere else."

"What about it?"

"Nightliss's people—angels, or whatever you
want to call them—built the framework for this place, right? And
supernaturals have added to it over time? What if the Grotto is
partly in the same place the angels come from? What if that out
there"—I jabbed a finger at the sky—"is the realm of angels?"

It was Elyssa's turn to stop dead in her
tracks. She flicked her gaze to the innocent-looking sky
overhead.

"Freaky, right?" I said.

She nodded slowly, eyes never leaving the
clouds, as if waiting for a host of angels to burst from behind
them and yell, "Surprise!"

"If the environment we see outside the Grotto
really belongs to their world, it must look a lot like our own," I
said.

Elyssa recovered and motioned me to follow
her. "Even if we are partly in their plane, the Grotto is
barricaded off from it. I read the history of the place. Looked at
images with only the original buildings here. When you get to the
edges of the Grotto, there's endless water to the north side, and
thick forest on the others. A magical barrier won't let you go any
further. The Arcanes tried for years and never succeeded. They
ended up using an obfuscation spell so gray mist hides most of the
view, supposedly to keep people with more curiosity than brains
from trying to break through."

"Or to keep anything on the other side of the
barrier from looking in? You said this place is a nexus, like a
bubble in between." I imagined it as a full-scale snow globe with
alien eyes peering in at us.

She looked inside a dress shop as we walked
past it, her eyes settling on one of the complicated Victorian era
dresses inside. "I guess it's like a pocket dimension. Maybe this
place isn't even visible from the other side."

"Or maybe the sky and everything else is
illusion. For all we know, we might be on the moon."

She chuckled. "I guess we're safe then."

"So there's no danger of an invasion sweeping
through here?"

"Not unless they built in a back door we
don't know about." She shrugged. "Anything is possible, I
guess."

I grimaced, imagining an army of insane
blonde women like Daelissa lining up to raid the Grotto. "The other
thing that occurs to me is how you called this place a
nexus
. Didn't you tell me Daelissa blamed the destruction of
the Grand Nexus for turning her people into those creepy cherub
things and stranding her here?"

Elyssa threw up a hand as if warding the
memories away. "Ugh. I really don't want to talk about the husks,
cherubs, whatever you want to call those nasty little things."

The husks—or cherubs as I called them—were
the creepy infantile remains of the angels caught up in the
destruction of the Grand Nexus, according to Vadaemos. They wobbled
around on nubby feet, like toddlers with oversized, ungainly heads
and little T-rex arms. But the shiny pitch black skin and nearly
featureless head hid horrors beneath. Sometimes when they shrieked,
the outline of a face seemed to appear beneath the surface.

I shook my head to clear the images of our
last encounter with the cherubs and found my way back to the point
I wanted to make. "What makes this place different than Thunder
Rock or El Dorado? Was it not connected to this Grand Nexus of
theirs? And what about La Casona and the other functioning
relics?"

Elyssa quirked an eyebrow. "I have no idea."
She tapped a finger to her chin. "But I have a feeling we should
pump Nightliss for answers the next time we see her. After all,
Foreseeance Forty-Three Eleven says our former rulers were going to
come through the Gloom."

We entered an alley and skidded to a halt. In
this very alley, we'd had our first encounter with gray men, the
creepy golems used by a man we called Mr. Gray for obvious reasons.
I'd discovered a large mural of him down in El Dorado and concluded
he must be an angel like Nightliss and Daelissa. He apparently
wanted me dead or captured, judging from my every encounter with
his minions.

"Uh, why don't we take the scenic route?" I
backed up a step, remembering the ambush all too clearly. "Not that
I'm scared or anything."
Yeah, right.

"Let's go down another block," Elyssa said,
mouth set in a grim line.

We walked down the street a little further
and entered a large marble-paved roundabout. A lush, green park
sprawled in the center of the huge space. Hardwood trees swayed
gently in the breeze, their tops reaching toward the sky.
Intricately shaped hedges adorned strategic places inside the park,
next to benches and statue fountains.

We continued through the park. My gaze slid
over the bizarre buildings surrounding us—one seemingly made from
snow-white plastic with shiny stainless-steel balconies, and
another patterned in the crosshatch black used in so many carbon
fiber designs.

"Why are we always in a hurry to do something
when we come here?" I complained. "I'd really like to take you on a
real date for once."

Elyssa squeezed my hand. "How about after
your magic lessons today?"

"Don't you have Templar duties?"

She shook her head. "I'm still on recovery
leave."

"Dinner and a show?" I'd seen a cool Chinese
restaurant the first time I'd been here, and Shelton had mentioned
a live-action theater he liked to visit.

"How about dancing instead?

Dancing wasn't exactly my forte, but so long
as it was with Elyssa, I was willing to give it a shot. "You got
it, babe."

A bright smile lit her face. "It's a
date."

We left the park and crossed the marble
street to the Orange store, bearing a stark white sign with a
partially peeled orange emblazoned on it. The building consisted of
a similar white material lined with liquid glass, rippling like the
surface of a crystalline lake. Across the road from Orange, almost
all three stories of the MagicSoft store were made entirely of the
liquid glass. I wondered if the floors were too. Unlike the last
time we'd been here, there were few people inside either store. We
walked up the glowing white stairs, passing a poster which
declared,
Now you can compare Apples to Oranges!

About a half-hour later, we emerged from the
store, my shiny new arcphone in hand. Apparently, smartphones were
considered dumbphones by Overworld citizens since they couldn't use
magic and were limited to traditional cell towers. Arcphones could
make use of just about any nom cell signal and the magical cell
network. My new toy was wafer thin and no larger than a credit
card. I dragged my thumb across the glowing Orange logo on the
screen, peeling the fruit and revealing a list of apps. I tapped
one of them to reveal a slider and slid it up. The phone expanded
until the edge-to-edge screen was nearly seven inches. I pulled the
slider down, shrinking the phone to five inches, then three, and
back up again.

"Will you stop playing with that thing?"
Elyssa said, an amused grin on her face.

"How did I survive all these years without
one of these?" I rubbed the smooth, polished surface of the device
like a pet. "Nookli, I love you."

"You are the wind beneath my wings," the
phone replied in a mellifluous voice.

I laughed. "Awesome!"

Elyssa rolled her eyes.

I played with my phone as we weaved our way
back through the Grotto to the parking garage. Despite the magical
origins of the new arcphone, it interfaced perfectly with my nom
email, and the salesperson had even ported all my saved texts,
pictures, and old phone number. I flicked through the few texts in
the list. Katie Johnson, my former crush, had texted me several
times over the past few days. Ash and Nyte, two Goth guys who,
along with Elyssa, had befriended me at an especially low point in
my life, had also tried to reach me.

At first, the messages showed up in typical
text lingo, with all the associated abbreviations and bad grammar.
Then the words shimmered and morphed into something resembling
normal sentences with proper punctuation. It was all I could do not
to kiss Nookli. What a smart little phone!

I felt guilty about not replying to any of my
non-supernatural friends since returning from Colombia, but with
the forces of darkness out to kill me, I didn't want to put them in
any danger. They couldn't deal with vampires, fallen angels, or
hellhounds. I'd barely held my own against most of the threats I'd
faced, and I was half demon spawn. Still, didn't my friends deserve
at least some small reply? Or would I put them in harm's way
somehow?

For what must have been the fifth time, I
pulled up Ash's texts and read through them again.

Dude, you still alive?

Seriously, man, holla back.

Katie says you're okay. Me and Nyte gotta
show you something cool!

Nyte's texts were similar, going on and on
about how he and Ash really wanted to show me some cool new
thing—probably a new nose ring or something Goth and gross. Katie's
texts were a bit more somber.

Are you alive? Answer me!

Your dad said you're okay. Thank god.

Ash and Nyte keep asking about you. I told
them you're okay.

Please, please, please call me when you can.
We need to talk!

She'd talked to my dad? How in the hell had
she managed that? I wasn't exactly on talking terms with him right
now, given his decision to betray Mom and marry a succubus by the
name of Kassallandra. My finger hovered over Katie's number. If I
could contact anyone, it would be her. She knew about me and the
Overworld, thanks to bad timing on her part and a pack of
overachieving hellhounds who'd chased Elyssa, Dad, Katie, and me
all the way to downtown Atlanta. Maybe it would be okay to call her
and ask about my other friends. On the other hand, what if Mr. Gray
or one of my other enemies found out about my normal friends and
used them against me?

I tucked the phone in my pocket and decided
to think about it.

"Don't look now, but we're being followed,"
Elyssa said, using the shiny surface of her phone like a
mirror.